


green fields and polar lights

by b_else



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Cuddling, Established Relationship, F/M, Holiday Traditions, I Don't Understand How Star Wars Tech Works, Jyn and Cassian Have the Exact Same Brain, Light Angst, Softness, This Is Not How Star Wars Planets Function, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28405119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b_else/pseuds/b_else
Summary: Jyn begins to dream of green loamy fields and warm rains, waking to see Cassian beside her, sleepily nuzzling her and falling back into dreams until Kay starts banging on the door.Jyn and Cassian start new holiday traditions together - and plan for the future. Post-Canon.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 12
Kudos: 57
Collections: The RebelCaptain Network Secret Santa Exchange





	green fields and polar lights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [andorjyny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andorjyny/gifts).



> Secret Santa gift for @andorjyny! Your prompt was so interesting, the plot is a little thin, but it's pure-fluff (with a little sprinkling of angst). 
> 
> I drew inspiration from my own blended family's multi-cultural, multi-religious/irrelgious spending of holidays (my mother's family is Puerto Rican, so it's not that I think the two traditions are interchangeable but that i was writing from personal experience of holidays). also this exposes how much i don't understand star wars tech or terms i had to check what 'glass' is while writing whoops 
> 
> hope you enjoy it!!! 
> 
> content warning: rated teen for kissing? and there's a one sentence saying they make love, as they do

The years after the War are strange, Jyn thinks. Somehow both too calm and too chaotic, everyone trying to figure out what _over_ and _peace_ and _future_ looked like.

For Jyn, wearing the scars of Scarif, this means staying with the Pathfinders. What else does she know, that she’s ready for? _And what do you want?_ Saw had asked her, that day Jedha exploded, but Jyn had never wanted to remember, at the time, not even after the Second Death Star explodes over Endor.

She keeps going, and the War hasn’t been won yet, anyways.

Cassian (and Kay) is there. Baze and Chirrut and Bodhi are finding new places, but they keep in contact. She visits Bodhi often, both of them sharing the strange knowledge as the only two people left alive who had loved Galen Erso, and later, the discovery that they have much more in common than believed. New political offices are being formed and bills are being discussed and old rebel squadrons are getting uniforms that don’t have blood patches and third-generation sewing jobs to hold them together. The Empire, now just rogue Imperial Cells, keeps trying, but they’re pushed further, and further, into Outer Rim territories.

Time between missions grows longer. And with time comes thinking, and things she consciously allowed herself to forget. At first, dark, filled with flashing colour and the roar of a blaster, Jyn begins to dream of green loamy fields and warm rains, waking to see Cassian beside her, sleepily nuzzling her and falling back into dreams until Kay starts banging on the door.

She lets herself turn the dream over and over in her mind as the days pass.

So now she and Cassian are shacked up in a little homestead on an icy Outer Rim planet of little importance, to rest after the mission ends. She supposes renting it with their pleasantly increased salary (were they even given a real salary during the War years? Jyn hardly remembers having a spare moment to spend credits on) is better than the drafty and increasingly emptier Rebel bases. The Imperial Cell here has been taken care of. Jyn hates the cold – she’s a temperate planet woman – but she sees the way Cassian looks at the strange, glass-snow. _Fine_ , she grouses. _We’ll stay a little longer._

Not that she’s complaining about having every excuse to curl herself around Cassian under as many blankets as possible.

“We should get up,” Cassian says, making a rousing effort by kissing the scars that run across the right side of her face. He draws his lips down her neck, following the trail that leads down into her shirt. The Alliance hadn’t had enough bacta to spare back then. She could get a skin graft done now, with the War Hero pension and all, but they’ve never bothered her. Jyn has lived life hard for long enough that she’s not going to be bowled over by someone calling her ugly. More importantly, they match those on the left side of Cassian’s face and body. A secret language only the two of them, on that beach, understand. _My mirror._

“Nope,” Jyn says, drawing her freezing feet up and between his shins. Cassian winces, but continues his ministrations.

“Jyn, it’s…whatever time it is,” Cassian lifts his head to peer at the pitch-black sky of winter. Jyn uses the opportunity to get her hands under his shirt.

Cassian swallows a yelp. “Stop leeching heat off me and put some socks on.”

“If you leave me, alone and cold in this bed, I will die, and every HoloNet channel will play the news about the brutal murder of a rebel hero.”

“Oh no, however will I cope?”

When she responds by gluing herself even closer to him, Cassian says, amused, “I’ll plug Kay into a charging station and you can wrap yourself around him while I make breakfast?”

“I won’t be held responsible for whatever I do to him, then.”

“Funny,” he murmurs, adjusting himself so that her feet are as far away as possible. She’s now sandwiched in his arms and chest, so Jyn considers that a win. They lie, there, drowsily, until she asks, “Does this remind you of Fest?”

Cassian’s fingers stroke her back contemplatively. “A bit,” he says at last, “It would be holiday season now, on Fest.”

There’s a wealth of unspoken words. She never wishes to rush him, but she can feel that he’s waiting for her to ask. Jyn presses a kiss to the scarred flesh on his neck. “What’s that like?”

A long pause. Then, “We celebrate the polar lights. It means the return of the Sun, and the ending of winter.”

In Cassian’s voice is the sound of green glowing light streaking over cities and homesteads. She imagines Cassian, so young that these things are more stitched-together fragments than true memories, watching them. He keeps talking. “There would be so much food. All my cousins and uncles and aunts would come. The house would be crowded. Noisy. People squeezed on any surface.” His tone softens. “Food. Fried bananas, roast pork and rice, coconut pudding, pasteles, a lot of alcohol and coquito – the kids got a tiny sip. Singing and getting dragged out of your house if someone came. Sweets and chocolates for the kids.”

When did he last have this?

Jyn touches his face, but finds she has no words for _I want to give you that again, even if our family is only six and some extra._ He seems to snap out of his reverie at her touch. For the moment, Jyn lays this thought, the green dream, aside. Leaning down, they kiss, his fingers sliding under her shirt, and they put Cassian’s mouth to good use for the morning.

Falling asleep again after their lovemaking, Jyn dreams.

She is five years old, in the apartment on Coruscant. Her grandmother, very ill, has come to visit, for what will be the last time. The sword of the Empire hangs over them, in her father’s haggard face and her mother’s increasing thinness.

But Vega, her mother’s mother, brings chocolates and gifts. It’s a beautiful little toy fighter plane that Jyn spends hours assembling and disassembling. Jyn dreams of a hearty meal, her father chasing around the apartment to keep her from the presents, she dreams of the Partisans and Maia’s soft lips on hers whispering _what do you want for the holidays?,_ Saw’s brusque, uncertain affections, blowing like leaves in the wind as Jedha burns beneath her father’s weapon –

She wakes to find her face is wet. When Cassian looks at her, she says, avoiding the real question, “Old memories. From talking about holidays. I just remembered…back on Coruscant. And with the Partisans. Nothing special.”

He holds her until she’s calmed. “It’s still important,” he says gently. Jyn lets his fingers stroke the back of her neck. Slowly, she feels grounded in her skin again, the familiar sting of the scars and old aches.

His eyes are distant for a moment, as though he’s thinking about something. They get up, after Cassian finds her a pair of thermal socks, and a blanket for her to wrap herself in. A holoprojector clatters as Cassian pulled it out. He kicks it back into the storage locker. She knows him well enough to see that the move is just a hair too slick, his face shuttering momentarily. Jyn raises her eyebrows but figures he’d tell her if it was for a mission. She tamps down her curiosity, grabbing the blankets eagerly. “You’re so overdramatic,” he says, as she bundles herself up.

“Oh, finally you two are out,” Kay says as they enter the tiny kitchen of the homestead. “I don’t see why I have to be around if you two are just going to be sleeping and giggling in there all day.”

“Who was giggling?” Cassian says, at the same time Jyn goes, “Well, you could always sit outside in the snow.”

“Let’s not forget who has the ability to pilot a starship in this group,” Kay says to her.

“Cassian would never leave me behind,” Jyn says smugly.

“I’ll leave both of you behind if you don’t give me five minutes of quiet to get food ready,” Cassian calls from where he’s unpacking the food capsules and pouches. Jyn makes a gesture to say ‘after you’. Offended, Kay joins Cassian.

As they bicker in the kitchen, Jyn picks up their long-range com set. She feels antsy and strange, the green dream whispering in her mind, maybe, maybe… Before she can think too hard, Jyn turns it on. “What’re you doing with that?” Kay calls, “I just spent -”

“Shut up and stay over there,” Jyn says over her shoulder as she begins inputting a message. It’ll take longer doing it manually, but she can’t have Cassian and her least-favourite droid hear.

They should have enough power and range to get the messages out. Three’s a party. Sort of. Plus, Bodhi and Chirrut will probably bring food. Should she send messages to Shara and Kes? Han, Leia, Chewie, and Luke? Then of course, there’s people who she sort-of knows like Wedge and Rogue Squadron…

She could ask then. Somehow. Holidays are about big changes, aren't they? Well, they'll make it a tradition. Next year, she can get him a tooka-cat or something.

Kay keeps blathering. “First I’m banned from your room, Cassian, and now -”

“That was a universal decision,” Cassian says, “Let me use that when you’re done, Jyn.”

“Sure,” she says, fingers moving feverishly, not even noticing that Cassian has a similarly distracted look.

“Sure, I can make it for a holiday party,” Bodhi says, his hologram flickering from the distance, “Just out of curiosity, have you mentioned this to Jyn?”

“It’s a surprise,” Cassian says. Jyn is using the sonic, giving him the perfect opportunity to com and send messages to everyone they know. Bodhi, obviously, Baze and Chirrut, he should definitely get Kes and Shara and their kid, Leia, which means Han and Luke and the droids and Chewie coming too, maybe some mutual acquaintances of Jyn’s…

The way she started crying in her sleep – their conversation had scraped up something there. Neither of them had any living family left. But they had this. They could have something new. She’d never put it into words, but he knew her.

Love was really making him soft, he thought wryly.

Bodhi kept talking. “Uh-huh, and this is where you’re going to ask her about _that_?”

Cassian turns the holo-projector over in his fingers. Jyn wouldn’t snoop through his stuff – after the Big Explosion of Hoth, they’ve learnt to set boundaries that just because it’s ‘all their stuff’, some stuff is off limits without permission – but there’s no telling if it could accidentally open. It wouldn't harm anything if she found out before he suggests it, but he wants to see her face when he tells her. Holidays are a good season for changes. He'd been waiting for a quiet moment, and since this is their first holiday where they aren't in a warzone - He's taking too long to respond and answers, “Yes. Not in front of everyone, of course – why are you grinning?”

“Oh, nothing,” Bodhi says, hurriedly waving his hands, one flesh and the other cybernetics and synth-skin, and looking shifty, “I just think you two are cute.”

Cassian rolls his eyes. “Just don’t bring up the holiday party if she coms.”

“Mmhmm,” Bodhi says, closing the com-channel.

Cassian hears Jyn bump against something in the sonic and swear. “You okay?”

“ _Fuck!_ Yeah, I’m fine!”

Cassian shrugs. Making sure she’s still in there, he taps open the holo-projector.

He’s tired, and Jyn is tired. The Imperials are dying out. It’s time to think of the after. _After_ feels tangible in a way he had never allowed himself to consider. _Alive_ , was already more than he’d ever asked for. Just being here, Jyn breathing, as steady as possible, beside him, it was something he had never considered in the lift, on the blistering heat of the beach.

But now there is hope for more. And he’d always been a man who lived on hope, clawed onto it, held it tenderly in his arms.

Green grassy fields, cold mountain peaks, somewhere where Kay’s servers will be fine, he lets the dream turn over and over in his mind.

  
Multiple messages appear on the little encrypted server they have: started after Scarif and dubbed ‘The Erso-Andor Betting Pool’, it hasn’t gotten much use after Jyn and Cassian finally discovered healthy human communication instead of weirdly shuffling around each other, staring intensely, and nearly dying on a beach under a super-laser.

Until now.

 _Did we all just get invited to two surprise parties at the same place?_ That one’s from Luke.

 _I don’t know whether to vomit that they’re **that** in love, or feel jealous._ Bodhi laughs at Leia’s message.

 _Excuse me?_ Han writes.

 _But we’re all going, aren’t we? – Chirrut._ Bodhi can already picture Baze long-sufferingly typing out Chirrut’s excited messages for him.

He’s definitely missed this. Bodhi types out a reply, then turns to Jyn’s frantically beeping message. Was she typing in the sonic or something?

The subject reads: _Good present for Cassian to ask him about that? Have attached list – DO NOT LAUGH or I'll tell Luke What Happened on Hoth  
_

“Cute,” he mumbles to himself, opening it.

  
“And Cassian believes you’re going to this planet’s moon to pick up some better winter clothes?” Kay says, as he makes the calculations for the jump. Jyn folds her arms from where she is seated as co-pilot. Co-pilot is a generous term. After wrecking an X-Wing on Yavin, Jyn has been banned from flying, and Kay refuses to let her touch anything in the ship.

“All that winging probably convinced him,” she says. White light streaks as they make the jump to hyperspace, the force pushes her back into her seat. Jyn clutches the transparisteel container tight to her stomach. Luke had recommended it to her.

“I used it when I gave Shara the Force Tree,” he’d written, after Bodhi had passed on her message.

She’ll be back in time for when everyone gets there. Jyn grins to herself. She can’t wait. A holiday party, with her family, with Cassian.

“That grin does not fill me with confidence.”

Cassian would probably be sad if she booted Kay out the airlock. Probably.

  
“Who could that be?” they both say when there’s a very loud thump against the door. She and Cassian look at each other, both bewildered.

Then Jyn begins laughing, while Cassian’s lips quirk into a smile: gentle, trusting, the one that makes her feel like she is home. “Happy holidays,” he murmurs, aiming for her forehead, but Jyn grabs his collar, dragging him downwards to press her lips to his, slow and languid and warm.

Eventually, Han starts hammering on the door, so they let them in.

It’s not as big as Cassian remembers from his childhood, but they make up for it in sheer noise. Kay is complaining about something while Bodhi, Kes, and Baze laden the table with food. He smells pasteles and tamales, dumplings and soup, roti and lentils, and still more dishes from the numerous planets and cultures his friends come from. In the tiny, extremely cramped living room, Leia, Shara, Chirrut, and Jyn are laughing and already breaking out the alcohol. Jyn hands him a bottle and the ingredients for coquito – where she found them in the Outer Rim is beyond him – while Luke and Han pass by carrying a holo-chess board from the Falcon, Threepio is fussing over something to Artoo, Chewie is herding the Dameron kid around who’s already excitedly asking if he can take a ride in the Falcon… Someone breaks out music as they eat, and Chirrut – by this point in the night, very, very drunk – suggests dancing, and Cassian has to stumble and step on Jyn’s feet for an entire round as she snickers.

He could do this every year, he decides.

As the party winds down, Jyn grabs his hand. She’s carrying a suspicious-looking box under her arm a little too casually. “Hey, can I talk to you outside?”

Cassian nods. The holo-projector is safely stored in his pocket as they pull on their cold weather clothes. Like many of the Outer Rim’s strange planets, this one’s meteorology is ridiculous. The few people who live here have installed shields over dwellings to protect against the glittering glass rain that falls sideways onto the planet’s surface. The shields bubble, the impacts blossoming across the blue field like second stars.

Together, they sit down on the steps of the homestead and watch the glass catch the light. Jyn tilts her head back, breathing in the quiet. For a long time after the war ended, quiet was an alien skin trying to fit itself over her body. Now, she can turn to Cassian and say, confidently, “I’m going to leave the Pathfinders.”

He waits, understanding she’s going somewhere. From the box, she pulls a transparisteel container. Inside, very carefully preserved, is a sapling. “I want to start a new life,” Jyn continues, “And… I want it to be with you. And we would have our family over, all the time, and I’ll tolerate Kay being around -”

“Only tolerate?”

He’s smiling, Jyn thinks. Slowly, she matches him. “He can be our new farming droid. I think he’ll _really_ enjoy that.”

“He’s definitely going to be the one watering this for the next few weeks until we get it in dirt,” Cassian remarks, but he holds the container like it is the most precious thing in the galaxy. Cassian doesn’t know much about plant species – yet – but he thinks it is a fruit tree. He imagines, and he knows Jyn imagines too, picking ripe fruit from an old gnarled tree in a field somewhere, their skin wrinkled, lines creasing around Jyn’s eyes as she smiles.

It's so much more than he'd ever hoped it makes the scars physically ache.

“And we’ll have holidays, every year, for whatever we want. Starting with this.”

The light of the planet’s moon hitting the glass bathes Jyn’s scarred, beautiful face in silvers, greens, and blues. From his pocket, Cassian pulls the holo-projector, turning it on. “I’m also leaving the Pathfinders,” he says, as a map of glowing planets hovers over them.

Jyn’s eyes trace the names, surprise, and then, contentment crossing her face. “Were you…picking out planets for us to move to?”

“You can choose. They’re all near enough to Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze, and have a temperature where we won’t both be complaining,” he says.

Green planets, with tall mountains and deep valleys, warm waters and soft dirt.

"You shit, I've been doing all this planning for a holiday party and to ask you about running away -"

"You say that like you're planning on foisting all the exit-paperwork onto me -"

"You fill it out so well," Jyn says, batting her lashes until he snorts, "But now this is just embarrassing. Two parties."

"I think we've lost any dignity with this crowd for at least another decade," Cassian admits.

"We just have to team-up to humiliate the other couples."

"Uh-huh," Cassian says, and Jyn bumps him with her shoulder.

They lean against each other, Cassian biting back a smile, Jyn's cheeks red from the cold. Her fingers close around her own gift. “So, it’s yes, then? No take backs? We’re running away to become farmers?”

Cassian nods, trying to contain a laugh. As the glass rain paints polar lights across Cassian’s face, Jyn grabs his cheeks, her thumb brushing the scarring, practically mashing her face to his. It’s clumsy and sloppy and she gets more of his chin than his lips at first, until Cassian quickly grabs her back and readjusts her. Cassian’s lips are warm and gentle, kissing her with the promise of what will come, his callused hands supporting her neck, stroking the scarring there. She can’t contain the stupid joy that’s bursting out of her, that everything, from Jedha to Eadu to Scarif to Yavin, Hoth, Endor, and then on and on until the New Republic was built, that she has _this_.

From the homestead, the sound of their family shatters the silence, laughter and yelling and talking and music.

“I could get used to this,” Jyn says thoughtfully.

“Me too,” Cassian says quietly.

Linking hands, they walk back inside.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a mighty-need to give characters scars, especially the ladies and none of this 'one tasteful little line on the chin' stuff. it's not mentioned but i head-canon Bodhi having a prosthetic arm and leg, and Baze and Chirrut having some new scars and internal cybernetics/pulmonodes. 
> 
> find me on tumblr at [b-else-writes](https://b-else-writes.tumblr.com/)


End file.
